


Take a Look At Me Now

by DarlingJenny



Category: Monster Trucks (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:06:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23126734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlingJenny/pseuds/DarlingJenny
Summary: Seven years after graduating high school, Meredith finds herself living in the same town as Tripp. It’s great to have a friend in town, but friends is all they are these days.Probably.Maybe.Or not.
Relationships: Tripp/Meredith
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	Take a Look At Me Now

**Author's Note:**

> So here's the thing: I love this movie, and I love Meredith, and I love her little romance with Tripp. But Tripp, much as I love him too, is . . . well, he's a teenage boy who I don't think has ever had a serious relationship, and can be a little self-absorbed at times in the movie. So I wanted to write something where Meredith and Tripp meet again as adults, having had some time to grow and mature.

o.o.o

“Tripp?”

The man at the next gas pump over turns, and she sees she’s right: it’s him. What is he doing in Williston?

“Meredith?” he says in tones of disbelief, and then he grins that massive smile she used to know so well—the one so big that the corners of his eyes crinkle.

It’s sort of jaw-droppingly attractive. Adulthood is suiting him _very_ well.

He closes the distance between them in three strides and wraps her in a warm embrace, and she’s glad he made the first move, as she hadn’t been quite sure how to react. How do you greet an ex you haven’t spoken to in seven years?

“It is so good to see you,” he says, pulling away and glancing at the state-issued Jeep behind her. “What are you doing here? I didn’t know you were back in North Dakota.”

Meredith reflexively looks back as well, to where Lou Ellen is watching her from the passenger seat of the Jeep with a very amused look on her face. “Internship,” she remembers to say. “Game and Fish’s Williston office.” And now it’s her turn to look behind him, at the massive red truck he’s driving. He always did have a thing for trucks. “What about you? Last I heard you were working in Bismarck.”

He shrugs. “Missed my mom.” He hesitates, then admits, “And Rick. Then I got this job offer in Williston, and it’s higher pay plus it’s close to Anderson.”

For a moment she thinks of the Tripp she knew in high school, cobbling together a truck out of any parts he could scrounge, desperate to put Anderson, North Dakota in his rear view mirror. If only his teenage self could see him now.

“Why are you grinning?”

“Oh,” she says, and decides not to tease him about his drastically altered opinions, “just glad to see you.”

That adorable smile is back. “Me too. I actually—”

He’s interrupted by a beeping sound, and he pulls his phone from his pocket and then grimaces. “I have to go,” he says apologetically, and then his blue eyes lock on hers, shockingly intense. “But can we catch up some time?”

She blinks, surprised. “Sure.”

“I’ll call you,” he grins. “Is your number the same?”

“Oh. Actually, no.”

“Okay, then I’ll—” His phone beeps again, and he grimaces again. “I really have to run. Do you still have my number? It hasn’t changed.”

“Yes,” she says, though she really isn’t sure why she’s kept it all these years.

“Call me?” he asks, and there’s nothing for her to do but nod.

“Good,” he grins, hugging her again so briefly that she doesn’t have time to react. “Seriously, so good to see you, Mer.”

And then he’s climbing into the red truck and waving goodbye, and Meredith is left alone in the gas station.

“Who was that?” Lou Ellen demands when Meredith climbs back in the Jeep. “He’s gorgeous!” Lou Ellen is 58 years old and a happily married mother of four, but she’s never let that stop her from admiring an attractive man of any age.

“High school boyfriend,” Meredith says. “I haven’t seen him since I left for college.”

“Oh,” says Lou Ellen. “But . . . you’re still friends?”

Meredith starts the car. “I mean, like I said, we haven’t talked. But we ended on good terms. We didn’t stop liking each other; it was just that I was going to Minneapolis for college, and he was going to Bismarck for technical school, and doing a long-distance relationship . . . we just weren’t that serious, you know?”

Lou Ellen nods. “But now you’re back in the same town,” she points out. “Are you going to see him again?”

And Meredith pulls the car out onto the street. “He wants to catch up. I’m supposed to call.”

“Good,” says Lou Ellen. “You’d better. This is the most exciting thing to happen in this office in months.”

o.o.o

But Meredith does not call.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to see Tripp; of course she does. He was very important to her, for a very long time, and even after they broke up—even after she moved to Minneapolis and started dating other men—she always kept this fond little spot for him in her heart: Tripp Coley, her first real boyfriend.

But . . . it’s been seven years. She has no idea if they have anything to say to each other. Not to mention, the more time that passes between now and the gas station, the more she starts to doubt her memory of that chance meeting. Did he say they should catch up because he genuinely wants to? Or was he just being polite, the way she’s told people “We should get together soon!” a hundred times before without ever actually expecting anything to come of it?

So she is paralyzed by indecision, and despite Lou Ellen’s prompting, she doesn’t call.

But luckily for her, the question of whether Tripp really wants to see her again is answered by the man himself. It’s nearly lunchtime, one day at the Game and Fish office, when she gets a call saying she has a visitor at the front desk, and she walks out to see Tripp standing there with a nervous little smile on his face. He’s in a chambray shirt, which is surprisingly fashion forward for him, and has he had his hair cut since she saw him last?

“Hey,” he says, and she can read a touch of embarrassment in his tone, “umm, so you didn’t call, and, I mean, maybe you just didn’t want to talk to me, but I also thought, maybe you didn’t have my number still after all, and you didn’t know how to get in touch?”

She blinks. “How did you find me?”

His grin broadens. “You told me where you work. Well, intern.”

“Oh, right.”

“So . . .” She’s rarely seen Tripp look uncertain, so for a moment she doesn’t realize that’s what she’s seeing. “I mean, I hope this isn’t weird, me showing up at your work. If it is, I’ll leave—”

A rush of affection for her old friend rushes over her. “No, I’m glad you did.” She hesitates. “I did want to see you, but then I started wondering . . . I didn’t know if you only said we should get together because you were being polite.”

The uncertainty vanishes from his face as he grins. “Have you ever known me to do something I didn’t want to do, just to be polite?”

“Hanging out with Sam,” she responds immediately. “Showing up for our biology tutoring.” She considers. “Though you certainly had a bad attitude about both.”

He laughs aloud at that, and then he tilts his head toward the door. “Come on, let me buy you lunch.”

She does.

They walk down the block to a greasy spoon that he seems to know well, given that he orders without even looking at the menu—some massive burger with BBQ sauce and onion rings. She orders what turns out to be a deeply uninspired salad, and they tuck themselves into a booth and catch each other up on the last seven years of their lives.

He tells her about school in Bismarck, and the machinist job he got in a factory there afterwards; he tells her about how he eventually came to wish he was closer to his mom and stepdad—"I'm still sorry I missed the wedding! I always liked your mom,” she says, to which he replies with an odd little smile, “Yeah, she always liked you too”—and took the job at a machine shop in Williston last year.

She, in turn, tells him about the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where she got her bachelors and masters and is now getting her PhD in conservation biology; this internship is her last requirement, and then she’ll have to actually go out and get a job. Lou Ellen has been hinting that she can pull a few strings if Meredith wants to stay with North Dakota Game and Fish, but Meredith isn’t sure yet whether that’s what she wants.

“How could you not want to stay here?” says Tripp. “Where else are you going to get—” he gestures at her limp lettuce— “the worst salad I’ve ever seen?”

Meredith laughs, and he _is_ clearly kidding, but after a moment his expression grows a little more earnest. “There are good things about North Dakota,” he says.

“I know,” Meredith says. “I’ve had fun being back here this summer.”

“And it’s probably nice to be close to your parents again.” He hesitates. “How’s your dad doing?”

“Better,” she says, and is glad now that it’s been long enough since the accident that she can speak about it without her voice shaking. “He and Mom are really happy over in Fairview; Dad likes being, you know, back in his hometown, back on the family farm. And he’s actually really liked doing the books for the farm. We all suspected Uncle Joe only offered him the job out of pity, but it turns out he really did need someone. Dad’s been enjoying it.”

“It’s nice that was an option for him.” He takes a sip from his drink. “Even though it’s sad you never had a reason to go back to Anderson again. I’d always figured that at least we’d both be back for Christmas and stuff, but . . .”

“I know, I miss it.”

Tripp nods. “And will your dad—how is he—”

She takes pity on him. “Doctors say he’ll never walk again.” She grimaces. “And that is why I will never keep a gun in the house.”

“Honestly, I haven’t been hunting since I heard that story.”

She snorts. “You never hunted before you heard that story.”

“Hey, I went . . . like, twice,” he defends himself. “Sam’s dad took me along fall of senior year, remember?”

How could she forget? Sam was walking on air for a month, so glad was he that his idol was actually hanging out with him. Also this is a great chance to change the subject away from her dad’s accident. “Speaking of, what do you do for fun these days?”

“Restore old cars,” he says, which does not surprise her at all.

“It still blows my mind that you didn’t become a car mechanic,” she says.

“If I’d done that, cars would have become work. This way, they can stay fun. Also I make way better money as a machinist.”

“Fair point. Is that all you do?”

“I go on drives too. I read.”

Reading? Tripp Coley? Tripp who told her on more than one occasion that time spent looking at a book was time wasted? “Really?”

His answering grin is a little shy. “I did learn something from dating you. I mean, don’t imagine that I’m reading, like, classic literature; it’s mostly . . . honestly it’s books about cars, mostly.”

Meredith laughs aloud at that, but she’s grinning at Tripp like a proud mother as she does. “I am happy to hear I was a good influence.”

There’s another of those odd little smiles he’s been giving her on occasion today. “You were.”

He takes the time to get her phone number, and when they’re walking back to her office, he casually asks if she has weekend plans.

“Church and visiting my folks on Sunday,” she says. “Nothing Saturday.”

“Wanna hang out?” he asks. “I was thinking maybe we could visit some of our old stomping grounds. See Anderson and everything.”

This lunch has been great. So she’s happy to agree.

o.o.o

The weeks that follow are the most fun she’s had since . . . well, since the last summer she spent with Tripp. Just like that summer, they spend long lazy Saturdays driving along sunlit, dusty roads in his truck, reminiscing about old times, catching each other up on the last seven years of their lives, listening to their favorite bands (he’s far more willing now to listen to what she likes, so that’s more fun for her than it used to be) and sometimes just enjoying the silence. They stop for lunch at greasy spoons, until he realizes that she always tries to order something with vegetables, at which point he starts finding them restaurants with decent salads.

They go to Anderson on more than one occasion, and visit all their old haunts, and spend time with Cindy and Rick and Sam and Mr. Weathers and a few of Meredith’s old friends. They drive once to the turn-off to the canyon where their extraordinary adventure all those years ago concluded, but they don’t go past the fence that Game and Fish put up after Dowd planted those horned lizards. Tripp confesses that he’s thought about going back to visit Creech a hundred times, but he can’t go past the fence and he doesn’t have a way to get down to the surface of that crater lake or summon its inhabitants anyway, so for now seeing Creech remains a fond dream.

And on weekdays, they go to movies, and out to eat, and she hasn’t spent this much time with a good friend since her old roommate Erin finished her masters and moved to North Carolina, and she’s so glad she happened to be filling up her gas tank at the same time as Tripp all those weeks ago.

This is all purely platonic, of course, although not everyone believes that. Cindy has not been at all subtle, the three times Meredith has visited with Tripp, and frequently looks back and forth between the two of them while barely concealing her smile. But she doesn’t say anything until the third visit, when she and Rick are having friends and family over for a Sunday afternoon barbecue, and she and Meredith are sitting together under the shade of an elm tree, eating pie.

How it starts is that Meredith says “I know I’ve said this before, but I love your yard.”

Cindy looks pleased, as Meredith had known she would; she’s always had a love of gardening, and a dream of having a beautiful yard, but working two jobs to support Tripp after Wade left hadn’t left her much time for it. But she and Rick bought a nicer house, closer to town, after the wedding, and she was able to cut down to a single part-time job, and she’s filled her spare time since then with creating the most beautiful yard in Anderson.

“You are the sweetest girl,” Cindy tells her. “You always were. I can’t tell you how glad I am you and Tripp are friends again.”

“Only until my internship’s over,” Meredith reminds her. “I mean, not that we’ll stop being friends at that point, I just won’t be around anymore.”

Cindy shoots an unsubtle glance over at Tripp, then says casually, “You could stay around, though. Didn’t Tripp say your boss at Game and Fish wants to find you a job there?”

“She’s brought it up,” Meredith confirms. “I’m not sure I want to take it, though. My goal was always to get out of North Dakota, you know?”

“You did,” Cindy points out. “Seven years in Minneapolis.”

“I guess.”

Cindy shoots another unsubtle glance at Tripp, which prompts Meredith to glance over as well, to where Tripp is helping Rick at the grill, and they’re both laughing at something Sam said. Tripp’s in a plaid button-up shirt and is just unfairly attractive, as always.

But that doesn’t mean Cindy’s hopes are going to come true, not even when she drops the attempts at subtlety and just asks “So you two have been hanging out a lot this summer; is something happening there?”

“It’s just friendly,” Meredith insists.

“Are you sure? All the time he spends with you, the way he smiles at you—I think he might be interested.”

And at that, Meredith can only snort. “Tripp was barely interested in me when we were dating.”

Cindy grimaces. “Was he as bad as all that?”

This is Tripp’s mom, so Meredith rushes to reassure her, “He was very sweet . . . when it occurred to him to be sweet.” But then honesty and wry amusement compel her to add, “The rest of the time he was kind of ignoring me to work on his truck, forgetting my birthday . . .”

Cindy sighs and covers her face with her hand. “Oh, Tripp.”

Meredith shrugged and laughed. “I don't hold anything against him. He was just . . . a dumb teenage boy. It was both of our first relationships. We both had a lot of learning and growing to do.”

“Was that why you two broke up?”

“No, that was just us both going off to school. It was all very amicable.” What she doesn’t say—no need to make Cindy feel bad—is that she suspects that if they hadn’t broken up amicably then, they would have broken up un-amicably later. Tripp was handsome and funny and smarter than he let on and sweet when he wanted to be and a good kisser. But he also could be self-absorbed and thoughtless and a little bit sexist at times.

And while he does seem to have changed somewhat since then, she doesn’t think a rekindling of their romance is something either of them wants.

Even if her heart does a funny little twist in her chest sometimes when he smiles at her.

“Well, if you do decide to stay, just know that you’d have people here glad to have you around,” Cindy says with a smile, and Meredith smiles back.

o.o.o

“That was amazing! Tripp! Did you see that? Was that not amazing?”

“Yeah, I saw it,” Tripp laughs. “I was right there next to you, remember?”

Meredith has no time for his sensible reply. “That was amazing,” she repeats. “Best movie ever. Rachel Carson is my hero.” She glances at him. “And I honestly can’t believe you sat through that.”

“You think I’m not interested in environmental science?”

“That is exactly what I think,” she says solemnly. “And especially not in biographies of science writers. Who showed the world the dangers of synthetic pesticides!” she adds with a cheer.

“It was a cool movie,” he readily concedes. “And I do care about the environment. I mean, after ten months of dating you, how could I not?” He bumps her shoulder gently with his.

“Could have fooled me,” she laughs. “You used to complain so much when I wanted to watch Nat Geo. You only ever agreed if you thought it would get me to make out with you after.”

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it? We had some good times on your couch.”

She punches him in the arm, and he grins. Maybe it’s this easy camaraderie that loosens her tongue; she says “Like you needed to put up with Nat Geo for that; I always wanted to kiss you,” at which point she blushes bright red.

They usually don’t talk much about their dating history, by some unspoken agreement; they talk about things that happened during that period, but they don’t talk about the dating itself. Meredith doesn’t know what his reasons are, but she knows that her reasons are her utter embarrassment at what a shameless, clueless dork she was—trying to hit on a guy by pestering him about biology tutoring, _honestly_ —and the worry she has that if she reminds him of their past, somehow that will make things weird between them.

But maybe she has nothing to worry about, because Tripp just looks absurdly pleased with himself, and she rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t get cocky,” she says. “Oh, Honey’s is still open. Let me buy you ice cream to say thanks for coming tonight.”

They take their ice cream to the playground in the park, so they can sit on the swings and enjoy the warm summer evening while they eat, and Meredith’s focus is entirely on her peanut butter swirl but Tripp still seems to be thinking about their earlier conversation.

“I didn’t do a great job,” he says suddenly. “When we were dating. Of being interested in your hobbies.”

She shrugs. “It’s not like I was there helping you rebuild that truck.”

“Yeah, but you were supportive. I . . . wasn’t a very good boyfriend, was I?”

“You were seventeen,” she shrugs. “We both were, and we both made mistakes, and needed to grow up a little. I think that’s pretty normal with high school relationships. And you had your moments—remember when we had to put my cat down? You sat with me for hours and hugged me while I cried.”

“It’s nice of you to try to make me feel better,” he laughs. “You always were nicer than me.”

“I know,” she says airily.

He grins at her, his face shadowed in the light from the street lamps, and then he makes what seems at first to be an abrupt shift in topic and says, “I dated this girl, five, six years ago in Bismarck.”

She blinks. “Okay.”

“Her name was Tammy, and she was . . . very open with her feelings. If she was happy with you, you knew it. If she was mad at you, you knew it. She dumped me after three months, because she said I was ‘immature, self-absorbed, and not ready for a real relationship.’”

“Wow. She sounds like fun.”

Tripp laughed softly. “I was glad she said it. It made me do some soul-searching, you know? Really look at myself. And I realized . . . she was right about a lot of it. And _that_ made me think, if I was self-absorbed and immature at nineteen, I was probably super self-absorbed and immature at seventeen. And I’ve wanted to apologize to you for that. For a really long time.”

Doing some soul-searching, being self-aware, apologizing for things he did years ago that she doesn’t think about anymore: this is a brand-new Tripp Coley, apparently.

“Thank you,” she says. “But really, don’t beat yourself up about that. It was a long time ago, and it seems like we’ve both changed.”

He leans a little closer, one hand wrapped around his ice cream cone and the other around the chain of his swing; she can’t read his eyes in the darkness. “ _Have_ you changed?” he asks, and something about his voice makes the hairs on her arm stand up.

“Of course I have,” she says, fighting to keep her voice steady, because it won’t do anyone any good if she starts letting herself react too much to Tripp’s voice; she’s leaving North Dakota in a few weeks, most likely, and fixating on things like the way he still affects her sometimes will just cause her pain later. “What I want has changed,” she adds, because it’s something to say and she doesn’t know how to articulate everything that's in her head.

Tripp just sort of subsides—that intense focus, that lean toward her, all just vanish. “Ah,” he says, and goes back to eating his ice cream, and asks her in a very different tone of voice what her favorite part of the movie was, and Meredith feels like she’s just missed something important.

o.o.o

With two weeks left in her internship, Meredith gets a job offer from an environmental resources management firm in Des Moines, one she applied to a few weeks earlier and did a phone interview with. Lou Ellen is not having it, and she disappears into her office for a long phone call, and comes back out with a competing job offer for Meredith to stay in Williston.

“Or if you absolutely must, you could transfer to one of our other offices,” she says when she hands a shocked Meredith the (surprisingly generous, for a state Game and Fish job) offer letter. “But you should stay here! You’re close to your parents, you’re close to your boyfriend . . .”

“Tripp isn’t my boyfriend,” Meredith says automatically, distracted with reading over the paper in her hand.

“Which I’ve never understood,” Lou Ellen says. “You’ve got this gorgeous guy who looks at you like you hung the moon, who seems to want to spend every waking minute with you. What are you waiting for?”

“It’s not like that,” Meredith says, although she’s not entirely sure that’s true. She’s been assuming for two months now that her relationship with Tripp is purely platonic on both sides—it’s been seven years! They both moved on!—but that moment from the swings last week pops into her head every so often, when he leaned close to her in the darkness, his voice low and husky, and she has no idea if she was reading into it something that wasn’t there, and if there _was_ something there, she is not sure how she feels about that.

“Well, in that case, I’ll just say, if you stay here, you’re close to your parents and your _completely platonic_ friend.” She gives Meredith a smile. “You’re smart. I think you would do amazing things no matter where you decided to go. But here, in all this beauty, all this wilderness, with oil companies chomping at the bit to get their hands on it . . . you could do a lot of good. But whatever you choose, I know you’re going to knock it out of the park.”

Meredith smiles and thanks her and walks out of her office with the offer letter in hand. Two job offers, both good: one where she can have a more direct impact on the environment, one where she can get out of North Dakota for good. She stares at the offer letter for a good long while, and then she pulls out her phone, wondering what it means that talking to Tripp is her first instinct (in most situations, these days).

_Lunch at Moody’s? I need your advice on something._

His response is immediate and apologetic.

_Already out at lunch, sorry. Supervisor wanted to take the whole team out. Dinner? Or you could just text me your question?_

She doesn’t want to wait until dinner. So she says,

_Got two job offers today: one in Des Moines, one in Williston. IDK what to do._

Tripp does not respond, and Meredith supposes he’s busy at his work lunch. So she’s surprised when she gets a call from the front desk ten minutes later, informing her that “your blond friend” is here to see her.

“What happened to your lunch?” she asks as she reaches the front desk.

Tripp seems anxious. “I got your text, but I thought this was a conversation we should have in person.” He glances at the receptionist, then back at her. “Can we walk?”

So Meredith follows him out into the summer sunlight, and they walk to the little stretch of park down the street, and when they’re standing in the shade of an elm tree, he turns to her, his expression serious, his hands shoved in his pockets.

“You should do whatever you want to do,” he says. “You’re too smart, and you worked too hard in school, to waste your life doing a job that isn’t worth your time.”

“Thank you,” she says slowly, wondering why he couldn’t have said this over text.

But he’s not done yet. “But if it was completely up to me, if I could be selfish, I’d ask you to stay.” And then he blurts, “For me.”

Her face heats up. “Oh?”

He seems a little embarrassed too. “Mer, you’re . . . you’re the only girl I’ve really regretted losing. You’re, you know, the one who got away. And I thought maybe that was just because you were my first girlfriend, or because it was a long time ago, and I was—what’s that phrase you use? ‘Looking through rose-colored glasses’?”

“That’s the phrase,” she murmurs, afraid to say anything more and distract him from what is shaping up to be an astonishing confession.

“But then you were in Williston, and we started spending all this time together, and if anything you’re more amazing than I remember; you’re smart and funny and compassionate, and I’ve never dated someone who’s so easy to talk to. And I’ve been wanting to say something for weeks, but every time I thought we were having a moment, you’d back off or you’d say something and . . . but now I figured, if you take that job in Des Moines, I’ll lose you anyway. So I might as well . . .”

“Might as well?” she prompts, because the rush of hope pounding through her veins is telling her that she has not been as immune to Tripp’s charms as she’s been trying to believe she is.

“I like you,” he shrugs. “Like, a lot. And I’m not saying that should change your mind about which job you take, but in case it matters to you at all, I thought you should know.”

He gives her a little half-smile, hopeful and vulnerable, and she’s reminded of the way he smiled at her that day at the crater lake, just before his truck tipped over the edge and fell hundreds of feet to the water below and she thought he was dead and she’d never been so scared in her life. There’s the same sweet vulnerability here, the same sense that he has put everything on the line and is awaiting the consequences but doesn’t want her to feel bad about any of it. She remembers the feelings that had rushed through her when they saw he was alive, and how, after the police had extracted him from the hole two hours later, he’d pulled her into a tight embrace and it had been the best thing that had happened to her in her seventeen years.

And she thinks of him now, watching movies about environmental scientists because he knows she likes them, eating at soup and sandwich shops because he knows she doesn’t like burgers, turning to grin at her from the driver’s seat like just having her around improves his quality of life, smiling indulgently as she sings along with her folk music in the car and fixing her kitchen sink without being asked and making her happier than she’s been in years.

She stares at him a long time, at his stupidly handsome face and his absurdly captivating smile. And then she smiles. “It matters.”

His half-smile blossoms fully into that massive grin of his, the one that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she confirms, suddenly a little bashful. “And—Lou Ellen was saying all this stuff about how much good I could do here, keeping the oil companies in line.”

“You could,” he agrees.

She takes a step closer. “And—I’d be close to my parents, and everyone I still know back in Anderson.”

“You would.”

Another step. “And . . . I’d like to be close to you.” She winces. “Like—I mean, in the same town.”

He nods, his eyes sparkling, and she adds, “And, you know, also just close to you in general.”

At that he grins again, and Meredith, feeling rather bold, motions for him to lean down to her height. This he clearly remembers—given their height difference, she did this often when they were dating, because otherwise it was hard for her to initiate a kiss—and his smile and his eyes get softer as he leans down.

She takes his face in her hands so that she can turn him a little and press a kiss to his cheek. And that’s really all she intended to do, except that now that he’s down here, she can’t help pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth, too. And that’s when he turns his head and kisses her fully, wrapping his arms around her to pull her up a little closer to his height, and this is not how she expected this conversation to go but she’s happy to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him back. It’s been seven years, but it feels so familiar that she can't help smiling. (In one sense he hasn’t changed: he was always a good kisser, and he still is.)

“So, that happened,” she says breathlessly when they break apart from each other.

He takes one arm away from her waist long enough to brush a piece of hair from her eyes. “That happened,” he agrees, his eyes warm and the corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile.

She grins. “Your mom is going to be thrilled. She has not been subtle about wanting us to get back together.”

That makes him laugh. “She always told me, ‘You’ll never do better than Meredith.’ She was right.” He hesitates. “So . . . you’ll stay?”

She grins. “I’ll stay.”

o.o.o

And she does. She takes the Game and Fish job, which thrills Lou Ellen nearly as much as the news that she’s dating Tripp. She protects the environment she grew up in; she puts her degree to good use. She sees her parents often. She visits Anderson and all the wonderful people there. She has a good life in Williston.

And most of all, she has Tripp—all her junior high daydreams and high school memories made flesh once again and made even better than she recalls, now that they’ve both matured a little: Tripp curling up with her on the couch to watch Nat Geo specials, and not only because he’s hoping for a kiss. Tripp teaching her car maintenance when she says she wants to learn what it is he does for fun. Tripp surprising her at work by showing up with her favorite ice cream. Tripp smiling at her from the driver’s seat while the radio plays and the setting sun outside paints his face gold.

Turns out there’s a lot to love about North Dakota.

o.o.o

fin


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